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A Straight, Cis Dude’s Reflection on Pride
They make it all about sex. The sneerers and spitters, the blithe dismissers, the judging castigators who allege that being queer is just about who you rub your body parts against. Who you create orgasms with. The hatred is bound up with the sex. They simply hate and fear sex. The power of it, the vulnerability of it, the lack of control. And as they conflate queerness with sex, they hate, and fear queerness. Once upon a time, I dated a stripper. She was brilliant, graduate of a prestigious Eastern university, after which she had ridden a bicycle to California. She was an activist, a thinker. And a stripper, very…
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Come and Meet Us!
Suntree Retreat 2024 is coming up, and you’re invited! This biannual in-person gathering of Atheopagans will take place Aug. 30-Sept. 2, at the La Foret Retreat Center in Colorado Springs, Colorado. It’s a long weekend of workshops, rituals, celebration, socializing, parties and fun! The last Suntree Retreat, in 2022, was really a high point in my life: a time when, surrounded by like-minded folks, I could really be and express my deepest self. So many meaningful moments! For more details on what Suntree Retreat feels like, listen to the latest episode of our podcast, The Wonder: Science-Based Paganism, where we interview folks who came last time. Click here for the…
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Chasing the Unicorn
EDIT: Saw ’em! A beautiful ruby-red glow across the sky around midnight! If you’re like me, you have a list of things you hope to see or do in your life. I don’t like the term “bucket list”, but that’s what it is. I am fortunate in that many of those things I most wanted to experience or places I wanted to go I have, in fact, been able to achieve. I don’t travel much any more because I can’t afford it, but I got a good two years of it into my late 20s, and over the years I have ticked boxes like skydiving and rafting the Grand Canyon…
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May Eve, the Darkness Before the Splendor
So it’s Walpurgisnacht, the night before May Day. Traditionally, a sort of transposed Hallows, with ghosts and spirits loose in the world before the brilliant dawn of the May. I sometimes think of May Day as the dawning of the World. There is something so grand and magnificent about dawn at this time of year, with the bird chorus and dew-spangled grasses, the cool-but-not-cold that will fade to kissed-skin temperate breezes. It’s luscious, and filled with wonderful memories for me. This year, May morning will fall squarely in the midst of the work week and there is exciting stuff happening at work that I must attend to, so I won’t…
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It’s here!
My new book, Round We Dance: Creating Meaning Through Seasonal Rituals is published and launched! I had a lovely book launch party yesterday in Oakland, California. It was great to see friends, read some passages and sell and sign some books. It has been about a year and a half since I submitted the manuscript for Round We Dance, and as I read pieces of it I found myself thinking hey, this is good stuff! Nice to feel that sense of pride in my craft. Here I am, signing. Isn’t Kimba’s coat amazing? She said it was like being inside a Muppet. I’m really proud of this book and I…
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Against the Golden Age
So, we were talking about “origin myths” in one of the Atheopagan community Zoom mixers the other day. And Mícheál, who is a member of the Atheopagan Society Council, suggested–somewhat facetiously–something like this for much of mainstream Paganism: Long ago, people lived in peaceful, egalitarian matriarchal/matrifocal societies that revered the Earth Goddess in many forms*. Since then, patriarchy has poisoned the relationship between humans and the Earth, subjugated women and created war. We must get back to that prior way of being. Now, this is grossly oversimplified, of course. But it is, at root, the story that many Pagans have told themselves, and often still do. Some still extend the…
